By Diana Wood
Published in the March 30 – April 12, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Sinking into the well-worn blue leather seat on Copa Airlines flight CM290 homebound from Paraguay to San Jose, I laid my head back in the headrest, closed my eyes and let out a deep sigh. My mind was racing a thousand miles a minute. I knew that never again would I be able to look at my life in the same way.
Seven days earlier I had arrived in Paraguay anticipating that something amazing was about to happen. I had been invited to be part of the Transformation Paraguay project with The John Maxwell Team and it was inevitable that “amazing” was already in process.
One-third of the Paraguayan population lives beneath the poverty line. We ascended into Paraguay to equip the country leaders through the Maxwell Roundtable Method with values-based content for them to teach to others, a revolution of transformational leadership to rebuild and transform the country from the inside out.
When I said “yes” to the Paraguay project, my expectation was that I was going there to help transform a third-world country. Never did I think that the melody and register of my life would be forever transformed.
One of the most impacting transformations played its way into my heart on the third day of our project. I was in a room with 200 other weary coaches gathered for dinner and our attention was captured as a single-file line of 18 music students walked into the room. Hair neatly combed with shirts and pants pressed with staccato crispness, the young musicians filed into their positions.
As they were not used to playing in an air conditioned environment the string instrument musicians were diligently worked to remediate the dissonance of notes sent out into the audience. Masterfully they were able to adjust the counterpoint of notes, yielding a blend of beautiful sound that danced in our ears and around the room.
No one would have ever known that when they stepped out of their homes into the vehicles bound for the evening’s performance that their surrounding environment was thick with the breath-stealing pungent smell of rotting garbage. Nor would a person imagine that these musicians just hours earlier received the daily installment of more than a ton of garbage from the surrounding city in the yard of their home.
The dominant chord of this experience is that as I listened to the music legato pouring out from stage, had I not seen it with my own eyes I would never have imagined that the music was being created from things people throw away. . .from garbage.
The backs of the violins and violas are created from discarded cookie sheets, the front portion from thrown away containers. The cello and bass string instruments are created from discarded oil and gasoline byproduct cans. The strings of the recycled material instruments are positioned by fork prongs. Guitars are created from empty candy cans and all wooden components of the guitar and string instruments are crafted out of pallets with meticulous detail. The wind instruments are reshaped from metal pipes with coins, bottle caps and spoon handles used to in for keypads. I could hear my heart crying out: how can this be? Such beauty . . . such treasure . . . they had turned trash into treasure. They proudly call themselves the Landfill Harmonics and their mission statement is: “You send us your garbage. . .we send you music.” Today garbage has a completely different meaning to me and I now look to see how I can turn any trash in my life into treasure.
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Morgan Hill resident Diana Wood is the president and CEO of Wood Motivation, a certified independent John Maxwell Team coach, speaker and trainer. She can be reached at Diana@woodmotivation.com
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